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Girls who share a womb with boys tend to make less money than those with twin sisters
Female twins who shared a womb with a brother tend to get less education, earn less money, and have fewer children than girls who shared a womb with another girl, according to an analysis of hundreds of thousands of births over more than a decade. Researchers suspect the cause is testosterone exposure during fetal development, though the exact mechanism remains a mystery.
"I think it's a really interesting look at how this really complicated system might impact females," says Talia Melber, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana who wasn't involved in the study. Still, she cautions, a lot more work needs to be done to establish a causal link.
Fraternal twins, in which each of two eggs is fertilized by a different sperm cell, occur in about four of every 1000 births. About half of those result in male-female twin pairs. Typically, about 8 to 9 weeks into gestation, a male fetus begins to produce massive amounts of testosterone, which helps jump-start the development of male reproductive organs and brain architecture; female fetuses receive only modest amounts of the sex hormone. In male-female twins, though, small amounts of the male fetus's testosterone can seep into the female twin's separate amniotic sac. Scientists have known about this phenomenon for decades, and have been arguing for just as long over what effects, if any, it has on women later in life.
[...] Controlling for factors such as birth weight and maternal education, women who had a male twin were 15.2% less likely to graduate from high school, 3.9% less likely to finish college, and 11.7% less likely to be married—compared with women with a twin sister. They also had 5.8% fewer children and earned 8.6% less money, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Evidence that prenatal testosterone transfer from male twins reduces the fertility and socioeconomic success of their female co-twins (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1812786116) (DX)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 20 2019, @12:05AM (4 children)
That was humor in the form of exaggerated despair. It's not something I'm actually worried about. The snowflakes who get so horribly triggered by masculinity even existing are almost entirely pampered women and beta males, both of which are utterly pathetic in conflicts of any sort.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 20 2019, @06:15AM (3 children)
The pampered women may hang out with the beta males crying about toxic masculinity, but they go out and pick up a 'bad boy' when they feel like a good fuck.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 20 2019, @10:30AM (2 children)
Some sort of alpha anyway, yep. Unless they prefer to eat at the Y.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday March 21 2019, @12:09AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday March 21 2019, @03:45AM
Mea culpa.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.